Everything that is wrong is the fault of '68: regaining cultural hegemony by trashing the left

In the burgeoning literature on the populist right, smouldering
resentment has so far not been sufficiently appreciated and expressed.

The Swiss Federal Council, 2007. (SVP) Christoph Blocher is second from the left. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.

The SVP (Swiss
People's Party) is Switzerland's largest political party. This was not always the case. Until the 1990s, the SVP garnered around 10
percent of the popular vote. As the
traditional representative of Switzerland's farming interests, it was the junior
partner in Switzerland's consociational government where it held one seat. Although a national party, the SVP had its
strongholds primarily in the cantons of Zurich and Berne, plus a number of
smaller, predominantly German-speaking cantons.

All this changed
once Christoph Blocher (SVP Zürich), one of Switzerland's richest
entrepreneurs, established himself as Switzerland's leading – and most
controversial – politician. Under his
leadership, the SVP morphed into a right-wing populist party, promoting itself
as a the defender of Swiss sovereignty (against the EU) and national pride
(against foreign and domestic detractors questioning Switzerland's less than
stellar role during the Second World War). But above all, the party made its mark as a staunch critic of
Switzerland's migration policy. Charging
that the country had lost control over immigration, the SVP called for
"measured immigration" by severely curtailing the influx of migrants of all provenance, but
particularly Muslim countries. Claiming that
Islam was incompatible with Switzerland's constitution and Rechtsstaat, the party made it its avowed goal to strictly limit
Islam's impact on Swiss society and culture.
It was in this spirit that the party – initially rather reluctantly -–
supported the anti-minaret initiative, which Swiss voters passed by a slim
majority in 2009. All this changed
once Christoph Blocher (SVP Zürich), one of Switzerland's richest
entrepreneurs, established himself as Switzerland's leading – and most
controversial – politician.

The SVP's
populist turn and particularly its radicalization on the questions of migration
and national cultural identity not only led to a substantial surge in electoral
support; it also engendered a revitalization of existing local cantonal party
organizations and the formation of new organizations (particularly in parts of Suisse romande, i.e., the French
speaking-region of Switzerland). By the
end of the first decade of the new century, the SVP successfully contested
elections throughout the country (one notable exception has been the Italian
speaking canton of Ticino, where the party has had to deal with an overpowering
"indigenous" populist rival – the Lega
dei ticinesi).

Switzerland
is a relatively small country, its political system quite arcane for outside
observers. The Swiss take great pride in
their version of direct democracy – even if (often abysmally low) participation
rates in local, cantonal and national initiatives and referenda might create a
different impression. This has not
prevented radical right-wing populist parties such as the Front National (under
Marine Le Pen) and Germany's AfD, from touting Switzerland around as a model of
"genuine" democracy. And yet,
this seemingly exemplary model of direct democracy – where even the
construction of a new road bypassing a small town is subject to a local
referendum – boasts one of western Europe's most successful right-wing populist
parties. Populism is all about
"returning voice to the people," or so the Front National has
famously charged. What, then, explains the
success of populism in the land of direct democracy – and, one might add for
good measure, one of the richest countries in the world?

The Swiss
case suggests that the right-wing populist insurgency that has occurred
throughout western liberal democracies over the past several decades has little
to do with promoting "more democracy" – a legitimate demand given the
pervasiveness of technocracy and TINA; rather, it has a lot to do with reversing,
once and for all, what the right considers the nefarious influence of 1968,
which in their view has undermined traditions and poisoned the moral fabric of
western democracies. The objective is
once and for all to defeat the post-68 left and regain the strategic heights
with respect to the production of meaning – what the Italian Marxist
intellectual Antonio Gramsci (persecuted and imprisoned under Mussolini) once
referred to as "cultural hegemony" and what in German is known as Deutungshoheit (power of
interpretation).

Cultural hegemony

In recent
years, it has become blatantly obvious that meaning is subject to profound
struggles and conflicts. The spectacular
career of the notion of "fake news" as a major new field of
contestation is perhaps the clearest reflection of the central importance of
interpretation in contemporary politics. Recent studies on the latest wave
of the right-wing populist upsurge suggest that culture rather than economics
is at the center of contemporary right-wing populist mobilizations. Right-wing populist voters are less concerned
about unemployment, cheap imports from emerging economies such as China or
having to compete with low-wage workers than about the dissolution of familiar
life-worlds and a shared identity. What
gets them riled up are not so much T-shirts made in Vietnam and hawked in
neighborhood shopping malls as mosques and minarets disturbing the idyllic
skyline of small-town Switzerland, Austria, and elsewhere. In the 1980s, "new-right"
intellectuals such as Alain de Benoist in France, Karlheinz Weissmann in
Germany and Marco Tarchi in Italy were instrumental in appropriating Gramscian
thought and disseminating key terms such as
"metapolitics" among right-wing circles.

Astute
right-wing intellectuals were quick to understand the strategic importance of
culture. In the 1980s, "new-right"
intellectuals such as Alain de Benoist in France, Karlheinz Weissmann in
Germany and Marco Tarchi in Italy were instrumental in appropriating Gramscian
thought and disseminating key terms such as
"metapolitics" among right-wing circles. Karlheinz Weissmann, for instance, insisted
as early as 1988 that in pluralist societies, the influence of political groups
is as much determined by holding actual political power (if not more so) than by
occupying the "pre-political space"(i.e., the realm of ideas and
meaning) – a feat, Weissmann held, that the left in Germany had accomplished in
the years following '68.

Two years
earlier, at the height of the Historikerstreit
(pitting German intellectuals against each other over the question of how to
deal with the Nazi past) one of the main protagonists, the historian Michael
Stürmer, pithily put into words what this implied: in a country (like Germany) where the people
were searching for orientation and identity, Stürmer maintained, only those who
"fill the memory, define the terms and interpret the past" are in a
position to take charge of the future.

The heritage of ‘68

Alain de
Benoist and his acolytes on the intellectual right were more than skeptical
about the chances of success of electoral politics as pursued, for instance, by
the Front National. Instead, they advocated
a "cultural revolution from the right" conceived as a process of
value change best advanced through protracted right-wing metapolitical
indoctrination. The cultural revolution
never came even close to materializing, largely because the new right never
managed to disseminate their ideas to a broader audience. New-right magazines, such as Benoist's Eléments (which is still around) and the
German magazine Mut (which ceased
publication in 2017) were too intellectually challenging to appeal to ordinary
people.

Ironically,
however, their ideas were picked up by political parties of the populist
right. Jörg Haider, for instance, stated
as early as 1993 that it was his main political priority to effect "an
Austrian cultural revolution with democratic means" designed to "depose
both the ruling political class and the intellectual caste (Kaste)." Some twenty years later, the objective on the
populist right is still the same – to achieve cultural hegemony by demolishing
the heritage of '68. As Jörg Meuthen, a
leading official of the German AfD put it at the AfD party congress in
2016: "We want to get away from
this left-wing-red-green contaminated '68-Germany." The response from the audience was roaring
applause. "We want to get away from
this left-wing-red-green contaminated '68-Germany."

This led one outside observer to note that the AfD was to a
significant extent an expression of the attempt on the German nationalist right
"to take revenge for '68" by reversing the "humiliating
historical defeat" at the hand of the '68 generation. Their greatest crime in the eyes of the
nationalist right: to have instilled a political culture informed by guilt over
the past. Hardly surprising, leading AfD
politicians have made statements intent on playing down and trivializing the
Nazi period, arguing, among other things, that it was a small speck in an
otherwise glorious history. The choice
of words reminds us of Jean-Marie Le Pen's infamous characterization of the
Holocaust as a "detail of history."

Ressentiment

That German
politicians would go to those lengths suggests that right-wing populism is to a
significant degree driven by long-smouldering resentment – that obsessive
emotion grounded in a profound sense of powerlessness, injury and
injustice. In the burgeoning literature
on the populist right, this aspect has so far not been sufficiently appreciated
and explored. Yet its importance for
understanding the motivational impetus for contemporary right-wing populist
mobilization is indisputable.

This takes
us back to the SVP. The SVP's dramatic
upsurge in the 1990s came in the wake of the party's embarking on a large-scale
course of populist mobilization, which directly morphed into a frontal assault
on '68 and its pernicious legacy. For
the SVP, as one leading party official put it, the'68 movement was a
"destructive brew" which made "its own laziness into a program"
resulting in the decay of traditional virtues such as reliability, hard work
and discipline.

It changed Swiss society in so fundamental a way as
"the SVP would like to do, but luckily has not managed to do as yet."
It created a society devoid of "moral and cultural
values, role models, myths and religious content" where egotism and
narcissism run rampant. The SVP has
clearly set itself the task of reversing these developments and returning the
country to an age where order, discipline and hard work were the order of the
day.

Order, discipline and hard work

This
program has a certain appeal in small towns hit hard by the construction boom
of the past two decades which has transformed them beyond recognition and left
in its wake congested streets, the disappearance of free parking, and the
replacement of traditional businesses by fast food chains; but also in larger
cities such as Lausanne and Geneva, which have major drug and security
problems.

A growing
number of Swiss citizens are tired of the proliferation of American-style
factory outlets along the major highways and large supermarkets where you are
more likely to hear English spoken than French or German; and of the fact that the
country's train system no longer runs as smoothly as it once did.

None of
these developments has anything to do with the ‘68 generation. They are rather the result of local
governments and administrations eager to attract companies and international
organizations in order to increase their revenue base by offering them all
kinds of tax incentives. SVP politicians
have been as complicit in promoting excessive development with all of its
negative consequences as have been the politicians of other parties. The frustration, anger, indignation and
resentment provoked by the results, however, have primarily benefited the SVP,
which in turn has used its electoral capital not to address the country's real
problems, largely linked to excessive development, but to promoting anti-‘68
nostalgia for a world that seems irretrievably lost.

About the author

Hans-Georg Betz is a leading expert on
populism and the radical right in affluent liberal democracies, and has written
several seminal books and articles on radical right-wing populism, nativism,
and Islamophobia. His academic profile can be found here.

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